This Week in Space 120 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space, we're talking about the 55th anniversary of Apollo 11, artemis 2, and Starship. Stay with us. Podcasts, you love.

00:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
From people you trust. This is TORQED.

00:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is this Week in Space, episode number 120, recorded on July 19th 2024. Remembering Apollo 11 and looking ahead. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the Apollo 11 and Beyond edition, and lots of beyond. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief Van Astor Magazine, and I'm here, as always, to my great fortune, with my good pal Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Spacecom and, sometime, twitch star. How are you?

00:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hello Rod. Hello, I'm not on Twitch, really, I'm on YouTube. Come on now. Come on. Oh, you do your gaming stuff on YouTube. Yeah, I haven't figured out how to stream on Twitch yet, so I mean, you know.

01:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't even have a thousand followers yet on youtube. He's on the twit network and he did okay. Well, um, very good, uh, so, uh, let's start right. Just we'll dive right in, because today we don't have a guest. We're going to be talking about apollo 11 yes, artemis, starship and a few other things. But first, big sigh from the audience. We have a space joke from our good friend, tucker drake tucker, who's a freaking contributor. Hey, tarik, yes, rod, what's green and roasted over a campfire? I don't know what a martian mellow.

01:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I love it I actually like that one. That's a good one, that's good.

01:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On the other hand and this is no reflection on Tucker, it's all, it's all on us but I got a couple of emails this week about people that said that their families, usually the younger members, actually gave audible size when they a joke coming up and they're like oh God, dad, really. But they like the rest of the show, so that's okay. So, anyway, we've heard that some of you groan when it's joke time and if so, it serves you right, because you didn't send a better one. So save us from ourselves. Send your best based joke or worst, or most interesting.

02:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You get what you put in, that's right.

02:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Gigo to. You get what you put in. That's right. That's right. You go um uh to uh twist at twittv. All right, enough of that, let's go to some headlines, and boy, do we have some, some juicy ones this week I was gonna spend a week, huh I'm gonna say stinkers, but it's not the headlines fault. So, um hey, california's lost texas's gain. Elon musk, our good buddy, has decided he's had enough of the golden state and wants to go to what's texas's nickname the lone star at the lone star state, that's right and, uh, you know, fits his politics, fits his sensibilities for taxes and everything else.

03:02
So I guess that makes sense. Now what I'm hearing out here uh and these are opinions, I don't know how informed they are is that either hawthorne, which is where their headquarters has been for 20 years, may not pick up en masse and go, but it may be the executives, but that the manufacturing will stay here.

03:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But we should. We should say like, exactly like what's going on, though, before we get into how it's going to happen. I mean, basically, elon Musk is very upset, apparently, at a new I think it's an LGBTQ plus law in California that relates to, I think it's transgender changes for kids.

03:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
As I understand it, um, oh that the uh, I know it's talking about gavin news, to just pass it.

03:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's that schools don't have to tell their parents exactly about that, right exactly that that schools don't have to inform the parents if the child wants to change their name or pronouns at school and then and request privacy Like it's and it's the first law in the US to do that and Elon has been, I think. I guess he opposes like those kinds of rights for kids.

04:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
He does have a trans daughter or anybody else.

04:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, he does have a trans daughter as well. Else, yeah, he does have a trans daughter as well. So there's some personal history there. That I'm sure is it. But he's pretty upset about that law and he said on Twitter I guess X pardon me he said that the governor of California just signed this bill, causing what he calls massive destruction of parental rights and putting children at risk for permanent damage, and then, because of that, he is going to move SpaceX's headquarters to Texas. He's done something similar to when California really cracked down during the pandemic about worker, safety and stuff.

05:01
He did move tesla tesla's headquarters, I believe to texas as well, so, uh, so the big question that we were talking about earlier now is that. So he said this at um, uh, there was a press conference uh later in the week that spacex was part of, because they, you know, they have this contract to de-orbit the space station, and in that one they said they haven't really been talking about moving the company to Texas because obviously it's brand brand new and so it's unclear what a move like that would look like, how fast they could do it. Is it just the main offices, which is what I think it would be, or is it like the factory writ large, like you were just talking about, in Hawthorne? Now they were in what, imperial City or just in Los Angeles proper for a while before they moved to Hawthorne to get the bigger— I thought Hawthorne was the first spot.

05:53
Hawthorne was the first big factory when they were still flying Falcon 1, I think they had a different factory, oh, okay.

06:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I remember when they opened.

06:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hawthorne a while ago. But that's a substantial investment. If they're going to move the entire factory to Texas. Big loss, like you were saying there, in terms of the manufacturing jobs and whatnot. They crank out rockets and rocket stages like there's no tomorrow out of there. They launch like what Well, they used to launch what? Multiple times a week. Now they're grounded until they can figure out this Falcon 2 issue that we were talking about.

06:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's just.

06:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Falcon 9. It's like the latest I don't know. I would call it grenade in the pond that Elon has tossed to shake things up and we're going to have to see how it, how it settles over time, like what they're actually going to do about it.

06:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And if you, if you go to the headquarters, maybe I don't know, fifth or sixth, the building at least, as, as I remember it, pacing.

06:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, you've been there, you've been there.

06:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, was executive offices, maybe as much as a quarter, but I think it lasts more like a fifth, and the rest is manufacturing, and it's a big place, you know, and it's heavy manufacturing. This is like the entirety of the Falcon 9.

07:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I have only seen it in the Dragon 110 freeway. Yeah.

07:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So that would be a big do, but I guess they could just move the executives out. But we see how well that worked out for Boeing. So I guess we'll see. And you touched on this, let's talk about that second stage, fit stage, failure of the falcon nine and what that means for spacex and for launching rockets, because that's right.

07:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But yeah, that was pretty fresh last week, right when, um, uh, when we, when we met, I think it just barely happened. So, yeah, the there there is an faa investigation underway now. Uh, when, when SpaceX launched their most recent Starship launch out of Vandenberg, I think it was but Falcon 9. The Falcon 9, yeah what?

07:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
did I say? Did I say something else? Starship, starship. You said that other rocket.

07:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That other rocket? No, yeah, it's Falcon 9. When they launched their latest Falcon 9, the upper stage failed during a relight and it had a leak. It's still unclear to me if it actually exploded or not, because Elon, in another one of his tweets last week he said that it had an RUD their Rapid, unscheduled Disassembly. But in a subsequent post on Friday, as you and I were talking in our last episode, spacex put out a statement where they said that the upper stage in fact did survive. It did deploy the satellite satellites just in a much lower altitude than they were supposed to be. Spacex did try valiantly to save those 20-plus satellites or so, but they were all confirmed. Jonathan McDowell, the satellite tracker, confirmed that they've all reentered now. They burned up and they're gone, and so that's a big loss that they're going to have to eat while they do this investigation.

08:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So excuse, me, but the Starlinks use ion thrusters right.

08:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah.

08:51
For raising and lowering their orbits, which can't compete with the atmosphere Exactly and they said that they put them at their equivalent of warp nine to desperately try to get them higher. But they were so much lower than where they needed to be and this is because they actually want to deploy them at a higher altitude. And then they have a maneuver that they all do quickly after, in the wake of another batch of Starlink satellites that SpaceX launched years ago during a solar storm. So all of those things, they weren't able to save these ones anyway. So in the days since you and I last talked a little bit about this, SpaceX is working with the FAA to try to understand what happened.

09:35
The Polaris Dawn launch of Jared Isaacman and his private crew, which was scheduled for July 31, is expected to be delayed. There's nothing public about it yet, but we're expecting them to push that one back. Nasa said it's going to do its own review too, based on the results of the SpaceX and FAA investigation, to make sure that they can accept that the Falcon 9 upper stage is safe and ready for Crew-9, which was supposed to launch in mid-August. In fact, NASA put out the media accreditation call just recently without even knowing if they're going to be able to launch or when. Meanwhile, SpaceX has actually applied with the FAA, or at least asked that if they'd be allowed to expedite a resumption of flights based on what the early findings are going to be for this Like if they think that it's not an issue for other Starlink launches you could see them doing that and then moving up to customer flights and then to crew flights, depending on what the stages are. It's still unclear how that's all going to shake out, but this is a very rare, rare failure.

10:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, two out of 310.

10:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean they had one failure on the pad during tests. Right that was that pad explosion.

10:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That was 2015,.

10:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
yeah, yeah, and then they had the in-flight cargo launch for NASA failure. And those are the two. Those are the two primary ones. They did have a Crew Dragon explosion during some testing on the ground, but that was really specifically around the crew Draco things that they would have.

11:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And these satellites launches don't have that kind of thing.

11:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So it's interesting because it's been a while. There was, in 2015, 2014, a spate of failures with not just SpaceX, but SpaceX was one of them, but you also had the Antares vehicle failure. You had, I think, a progress or a couple of progress failures, and they were all like kind of in a row these flights to the space station, these cargo flights, which caused some ripples down the line, but SpaceX has been on a tear. They wanted to launch like something like 110 rockets this year they were 60-plus, I believe, at the point of this one here and so this drought is going to affect their launch targets for the year, depending on how fast they can get it turned around.

12:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, we wish them luck, because they're not the only game in town, but sometimes it feels like it and it's worth pointing out, you know, for just in case anybody. I think most of our audience knows this. But uh, I heard somebody saying oh, I was on a radio radio segment. I was doing this so well, but they use these rockets over and over again, right? And I said yeah, but not the second stage.

12:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is all brand new hardware. It's always brand new, yeah, and they had a fuel leak. It was a very visible fuel leak on the stage, you can see a lot of ice and everything there and they traced the failure to a period during a relay where they do like a one-second fire of the thruster to normalize the orbit there for deployment.

12:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, let's send them a nice get well soon card. And we have another starship. Speaking of SpaceX, still, we have another starship test coming up now. That shouldn't be delayed by this, correct, no well?

12:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
not, not that I would think. Well, by the. You know the, the starship is fundamentally like a much different vehicle. It has the super heavy booster, it has the Starship upper stage, which is very different. Starship has what? Six Raptor engines, as opposed to the one Merlin upper stage or whatever. It is the vacuum one that the Falcon 9 rockets have. So it seems like there isn't a lot of cross-pollination there. However, you know, if there is some kind of commonality because the Raptor engines are evolutions of the Merlin engines if there's any kind of commonalities, they're going to want to X all of that out before they try this. However, they've been steadily testing the Starship Super Heavy Booster at their Starbase pads and it seems like SpaceX is serious when they say they're going to try to catch the booster on the way down. That seems really, really sporty. I thought they would at least build a second pad before they tried it yeah a second pad before they tried

14:04
it, but they seem like they're really pushing it and gearing up for it within a few weeks. So I mean, I had expected them to try it before the end of July, although there's not a lot of room left this month for it. So perhaps by August we'll see this actual uh launch and and capture test and that'll be. That'll be exciting and maybe that'll be like the big launch you know, private launch of the summer instead of polaris dawn while they're waiting for the uh, the falcon 9 investigation to complete.

14:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So so far, every uh booster stage has exploded no, uh, the the one that came down the ocean also. Uh exploded in the last moments no, I don't believe so.

14:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think it. It hit the ocean and if it exploded it was because it hit the ocean. Okay, okay, um so but.

14:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But if you bang into a launch pad and you still got some fuel in those, uh, in the tanks about the descent engines, I wonder what happens yeah, yeah.

15:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, that I think that makes SpaceX wants to find out too. But if you watch, if you see the video from the booster that they shared after the Flight 4 launch, it actually like splashes down and then tips over and then the video goes out so it like falls down. So they made their quote unquote soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. So that was pretty exciting to see. We'll see, well, I mean, but that's very different than hovering right next to a giant metal structure. That is like trying to grab you by your little wings. You know your little. What are those, those titanium veins that they use at the top?

15:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
The great fins yeah.

15:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to catch them. So what is that? That's like a how many tons is it? It's like double-digit tons, many, yeah, that they're going to on those little hinges there.

15:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, let's try and pound through these before we go to break here.

15:58
Sure, oh, this one's a heartbreaker.

16:01
So the viper rover, which is nasa's, was rip, the nasa's planned rover, but talking about it for years was going to go to the lunar south pole region and look for volatiles, meaning water, ice and things like that that we can use down there. This was going to be the big crowning moment of glory for the uh, the of the Landers program that they've been doing with intuitive machines and others Hasn't really worked out yet, but fingers crossed, yeah. And this was our next big step towards getting back to the moon and why we're going there for resources to utilize and so forth to the moon, and why we're going there for for resources utilized, so forth. And politically speaking, since this is a political season and we've got a, a presidential election coming up which is going to have a lot to say about what happens with nasa and the moon, among other things, this was kind of the only thing we're really doing towards the idea that we can not pull ahead of is like that's his big up with well, it's their keep up with china mission.

17:09
You know it used to be the okay, we've got to stay ahead, and now we're. We're back in 1960, you know. Oh, we have to catch up. They're doing really well so, and and you know, this isn't a nasa issue, this is a funding and continuity of mission issue. So, speaking of continuity of mission, the Viper Moon rover, which is a fairly large, heavy, volatile searching machine, was supposed to land on the Intuitive Machines' Griffin lander later this year or next year.

17:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It was supposed to land at the end of 2023. And that's part of the issue that has happened.

17:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Why Let?

17:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
me check my watch. Yeah To the past, yeah, Gosh. So just so everyone knows like the number is here. And this is because, as Rod said, this was a huge surprise. Nasa put out a press release earlier this week that said hey, we're going to have a press conference. It's a teleconference, which usually means it's not that big of a deal. You know, it's like a newsy update, it's not like a major update. We're going to do it at four o'clock in the afternoon, which is suspect. Four o'clock means that it's the end of the news cycle.

18:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And, by the way, they did not, as I recall, use the word canceled anywhere.

18:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, they said end, they said end.

18:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, which is very strange, we were ending the mission.

18:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Usually you end a mission after it succeeded, right? And this Viper mission, they have spent $450 million already on just the rover itself, and I think that the Griffin lander under the NASA Eclipse program was another $300 million kind of a thing. I could be wrong about that number, Rod, Please correct me if you know. And it was budgeted originally for $505 million if it was going to be able to launch by the end of this year. Now, like I mentioned earlier, it was supposed to launch in 2023, and they weren't able to, largely because of part delivery delays from the pandemic that snowballed. So they can't keep building it until they get this specific part. It's delayed because of the pandemic that snowballed. So they can't keep building it until they get this specific part. It's delayed because of the pandemic and then they all snowball down from there and they had some other delays in developing the rover. So that was one thing. They had these delays building it, but and it you know, it's built right now.

19:19
The rover is finished. It's not all the way, you know, shaked and baked and tested and everything like that, but they have finished the rover, so it's done. And this is the part that's really, really sad At the same time. Like you mentioned, it's going to launch on Astrobotics Griffin lander. Their last lander, which was smaller, didn't really peregrine, didn't make it to the moon as expected, and so they had to learn a lot from that and make sure that Griffin, which is a lot bigger and a bit more robust, wouldn't suffer the same fate. So some delays on the S-robotic side for doing that, Then the regular delays from a company building a brand new rover, and then there's also some more complexity because the vehicle NASA is just one passenger on this commercial lender. There's other other passengers too.

20:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So nasa says okay, payload, payload. Well, payload well, passenger yeah, I gotta get what you're saying, but I just don't want to make people think, wait a minute, they're beating artemis.

20:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So that'd be nice. So a lot of moving parts, literally. And when push came to shove and nasa looks at the schedule, they're like well, we can't make the launch by december 2023, we are delayed in testing this, uh, this rover and this lander. So the rover is not going to be ready until september of 2025 that's next year, you know which is also when artemis 2 is supposed to launch, after its own delays, and viper was supposed to be like the vanguard for artemis 2 in in the beginning. Okay, so the griffin lander also now delayed until september 2025, so it's not going to be ready to launch.

20:53
And that sounds like it'd be fine. Right, you got the rover and the, the, the payload, ready to launch at the same time. That'd be great. But nasa thinks that there's not enough wiggle room, not enough buffer if something goes wrong with either the rover or the lander, for them to be able to execute the mission and not have to spend oodles of more money. Because if the lander is delayed more, then NASA doesn't think that they can launch until November now of 2025. And Viper can only work during a very key set of the time of the year because of the sunlight that is needed at the South Pole, where there's not a lot of it, and so they said but the best part is here's our answer for this right.

21:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So so word from the inside is that the, the Viper Rover, is fine. The money is well spent, it works, there's no problem with that Nothing wrong with? It. They have another $80 to $85 million to spend to finish. But a lot of that, I suspect, is integration, because I think integration is part of the rover.

21:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And testing. They haven't done the shake and bake, the temperature, the vibration. They haven't done all of that stuff.

22:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But the answer here, instead of saying okay, we'll go later, is to put an inert block of mass, probably a steel cube or something, on the Griffin lander to replace the rover and pull the rover apart and take the bits and pieces and instruments and so forth away from it for use on other projects which you know. It's better than than rolling it out the back door into the rain and letting it sit there.

22:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't, I don't understand. I tried.

22:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's so much money spent on integrating it as a Rover and then to pull it apart. You've got to be blowing and this is me, not as a NASA budget specialist or anything opining but you've got to be blowing at least a third of that budget away, if not more. Oh, there was some other stuff Using it as salvage.

22:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think the ground control systems weren't set up like the little mission operations center. I think that wasn't set up yet either. But you're right To make it clear. They are canceling the mission to save $85 million after sinking $450 million already into the spacecraft. So that is why they say that they don't have enough budget. If there's cost overruns because of that and it is really it's still very hard to understand because they have a rover that they don't think there's anything wrong with and they're just going to kind of junk it. Now they say that they'll sell it. If someone out there wants to buy a rover at cost from NASA so that it doesn't cost NASA anything, they'll sell it.

23:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But you are right Because so many players in private industry have a half a billion dollars to spend on a rover right.

23:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And the deadline. By the way, as you and I are recording this, it is july 19th. The deadline is august 1st for those offers.

23:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's like a week and a half, yeah, yeah wait a minute.

23:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This thing's been delayed by years and now they're saying okay, we're giving you 10 days, count them 10, so put in your bed here and the and the and the, the, the, the nominal go forward, like you said, because they are committed under the Eclipse contract separate to fly. This Griffin lander mission with Astrobotic is to fly in inert mass simulator that's so like a tungsten block or whatever it is they're going to choose, and they said that well, if Astrobotic sells more space on the lander, then they'll pare down or shave some pounds off their mass simulator to give Astrobotic the flexibility to add more payloads. But that's not a lot of time, like a year and a half, to accept, solicit and test new payloads, and then they're going to just take apart all of the experiments on this Viper lander and then try to put them on future missions. The rationale, though, for scrapping this on the science side is that they're going to fly very similar instruments on other missions.

24:56
There's another moon lander that's supposed to launch at the end of this year Prime 1, to go drill into the moon to look for ice. They said oh hey, we're going to have this new lunar terrain vehicle that we're going to be able to send for Artemis and that's going to be autonomous too. We'll be able to send that where we want to, and it's going to have instruments on it too. That's a vehicle they don't even have yet. They haven't even picked the vehicle and tested it and whatever. So they're betting on other systems that they don't have already and saying, well, we already have it coming, so we're going to cancel this one.

25:30
It's just disappointing, because we remember the Constellation era, where they had this whole big slate of rovers and whatever that were going to pave the way to the moon, and then they canceled them all one by one, by one, and all we got was like LCROSS impact mission and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is fantastic and still doing great science, and so this could be the start of that. Again, I don't know. I don't know, Rod, I don't know what to say. Maybe I got it wrong and NASA is smarter than I am.

25:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, hey, nasa is two top media experts in their field. Tell me you're not looking good. So hey, give us a call and we'll walk you through this. Okay, now that I've embarrassed myself, one more bit here before we go into our main story, and that is the passing of Lou Dobbs, your former boss.

26:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right. Well, the founder and co-founder of Spacecom died this week. He was 78. I actually only met Lou Dobbs one time.

26:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wait, he was only 78?, Really, yeah, wow, I thought he was much older than that.

26:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But he had politics that might be not know, not, not uh, uh, everyone's cup of tea. Uh, I do know that he was very interested in space and uh, and that he, he saw it as a business. Uh, maybe a lot earlier than what everyone did. He had he wrote a book about the business of space as well in um, the early 2000s. Uh. Now I never met lou uh in person, with the exception of one time at like a renaming party for the company.

27:06
You know, I just we had to mention and mark on his passing because Spacecom wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him and his co-founder, rich Zyrdek, back in 1999, they launched the company. Here we are 25 years later. It's our 25th anniversary this week. Actually, I got this nice nifty shirt I just found it vintage for that and I'm just very thankful that there's a place where we can all celebrate space on the Internet like we have, and we wouldn't have had that without him, I think. So, yeah, it's a bit of a solemn week for us at Space to kind of mark the passing, but it's also kind of a weird celebratory week too, because it is our anniversary and we're looking ahead to the next 25 years and beyond, and it all started in 1999 in July.

27:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So on the anniversary of Apollo. If it wasn't for for Lou and his, his internet service, you'd probably be working for me, and that's right. You'd be living in Barstow and you wouldn't have a family. Okay, we're going to be right back after we take the short break. Don't go anywhere. The excitement is just about to start, so let's talk about Apollo 11. We have just had the 55th anniversary of the launch and, as of the time of this recording, july 19th, tomorrow will be the 55th anniversary of the landing. Now, this one's kind of interesting to me because the media loves big round numbers of zeros on the end 10th anniversary, 50th anniversary, 100th anniversary and I realized yesterday that I'd be 100 and uh, what would I be 111 when that anniversary comes. So that's unlikely. Um, actually, that's incredibly unlikely. You'll probably still be cut out.

28:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Cut out the cigars and and take up jogging rod. You'll make it. You'll make it can.

29:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Can you picture me jogging? It's a frightening thought, but I did look around, so I was invited to this cool event they're having down at the San Diego Aerospace Museum, and Jerry Griffin will be there, former Apollo flight director, jsc director, among many other stellar credits that kind of blow my mind. Charlie duke uh, moonwalker from apollo 16, will be there and buzz, our friend, buzz aldrin, will be there.

29:30
Yeah, uh, and I haven't heard from buzz in a while well and as things are going, you know, for a lot of these guys, every time I hear they're going to be somewhere, you got to wonder. You know, this is their last one. This is their last one, not because this their last one, not because I don't think they're going to be around, but because it gets harder to travel. I mean hell. You know. If somebody says to me hey, we want you to come to this event and you're flying like budget coach in the back of the plane, I'm in my sixties and I'm like, uh, really frontier airlines, I'd rather stick a pencil in my eye. So know, I imagine for people in their 80s, 90s, traveling is is a little tougher than that. So kudos to them. Uh, I'll, I'll come back and brag about it afterwards, um, but I I think it's gonna be a cool event. And what shocked me was I didn't realize it's the only live face-to-face.

30:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We have people from the apollo program coming event for the santa vera three, which kind of surprised me, you would think they would want to do something every year because, as you mentioned, like the people that made all of those discoveries, all of that effort, uh are are getting uh a bit long in in the tooth that you'd want to celebrate them as long as, as as much as you can with with the time that they've that they've got. So, um, it's weird. No, I, I, I understand too. I I find it frustrating every anniversary that we celebrate apollo 11 as the first lunar landing with astronauts and we haven't done it again right it's kind of remarkable isn't?

30:59
it, you know it uh.

31:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
55 years well, 53 years locked in Earth orbit and doing great things, but yeah.

31:08 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I went back five years to our last anniversary, when Spacecom was 20, because Spacecom was founded on the 30th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20th 1999. In fact, that was Spacecom Day in New York City. There's an official proclamation. I can't find it. It's in storage somewhere. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. It was really cool, that's wild.

31:35
But in 2019, when I wrote my thank you for 20 years of Spacecom, I was so excited because, hey, in 2024, we're going to have people walking on the moon, and isn't that going to be great. And now here we are in 2024, and we don't know when people are going to be walking on the moon Maybe 2026.

31:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, we know somebody will be walking on the moon. The question is, what language will we be hearing down here? All right, so as long as we're talking about this, let's take a stroll down memory lane, shall we? Anthony, if you could cue up the launch audio? So I was 11 or 12 when Apollo 11 launched, and back in those days and I'm playing this not just to belabor the point that I'm an angry old man, but because, Well, here we go.

32:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh yeah, yeah, One zero. Look at it go, we have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour. Wow.

32:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Liftoff on Apollo 11. Oh, apollo 11. Now I want you to notice a couple of things. Number one jack king, who was the public affairs officer at the voice of nasa control.

32:53
No, he's the voice of launch control, the voice of launch control then they hand it off to johnson and that guy was a lot, was still great, but he was a little less flashy than Jack. Jack, I met him, interviewed him once, really interesting guy. They didn't give a NASA commercial at the moment of liftoff. So ever since, kind of the middle of the shuttle era forward, it's like, and we've cleared the tower, mission 151L, exploring new heights in space and taking Coca-Cola, I mean, it goes on and on and it gets worse as things go along and it just makes me crazy. I like and this is me being a cranky old man, I liked the kind of spare, engineering-oriented facts, ma'am.

33:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Look at what we've done. The engines are burning.

33:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And then we heard so that's one thing. Then, as we go along and this is still the same, I think you hear Neil Armstrong talking like he's walking his dog around the block. He's not even excited, his heart rate doesn't sound elevated or anything. I don't know what it actually was at launch.

34:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, they tell you, though, like Jack King will tell you, or when he's walking on the moon, or landing on the moon, he's walking on the moon?

34:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, but for the launch he's like roll program, All right. Coming up on stage separation, it's like yeah, no big deal. And this was the let's see 8, 10.

34:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This was the third crewed flight of the Saturn V, right, yeah you had Apollo 8 and 10, which was the near landing, and then 11.

34:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and 11. And that was it. And you know this was a massive, experimental essentially rocket that had flown just in testing twice before they put a crew on it. So you know, in addition to how much courage it took to step into the Apollo 8 mission, now you're taking that sucker's upper stage all the way out to the moon and you're going to go into lunar orbit and land and that's, that's a big thing. So, um, okay, we've heard enough. That's good.

35:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Thanks, um you know it's crazy, as I'm we're watching this video that I'm sure we'll have a link in the in the show. The show links uh later of the of the saturn 5 and I can't. I can't get around the fact that last year I watched a rocket bigger than that lift off the ground right with starship and and what that's going to be like, yet with less capacity, which is frustrating as well.

35:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean, yes, it can carry a large mass somewhere, but not to the moon without 20 refuelings. There is that, so they can tell you, oh, it can carry more into orbit, but it can't get more to the moon, Right?

35:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean that Saturn V rocket had everything that it needed to get there. You know, it got off the ground and then it just went.

35:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It didn't sit there in orbit, people and a lander.

35:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, wow, yeah, and a car eventually.

36:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah. So, speaking of landers, let's go to the landing clip. So before you roll that, anthony, hang on one second. So I'm indulging myself here. So you'll have to pardon me, but this is a very, very fond memory for me Because, again, I was a first-year teenager Hauled into the living room at I think it was six in the evening here, eight something like that, to sit in front of our little crappy 13-inch black and white television to watch one of three networks.

36:33
When you watch TV in the US, it was either one of the three networks or some awful local channel, but you watch the networks because that's where the cool announcers were. So the anchormen were. So the anchorman were, uh, walter cronkite, of course, of course of cbs, I think, huntley and brinkley on, uh, the abc or nbc I should remember this, I don't and then, uh, for the specialists, guys like frank reynolds and so forth. Um, but cronkite was my guy. I think it was for a lot of people, largely because he was charming, he felt like an uncle and and he really knew the program and he was friends with the astronauts and he was kind of the inside guy. So sitting there listening to this descent to the lunar surface with the neil armstrong and buzz aldrin. Descent to the lunar surface with the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was riveting, even though we didn't know a tenth of what was really going on.

37:28
And because you know, if you were interested in in the Apollo program, which I was, there was Life magazine. There weren't any books yet, except for the NASA pamphlets that were published, but there's none of the plethora of books. Now there was no internet. So there was. There was life magazine, time, uh, a couple of others and newspapers and then nasa handouts. That was it. Yeah, and if in school I kid you not, I mean I would go to the school library this is elementary school I'd go to the library to pull out a book on space exploration and I'd look up and literally they have three of them by Willie Lay and others, the big golden book of spaceflight with these banana-shaped silver rockets. It was awful. So for a kid that was interested in this, there was nothing but watching the television network.

38:17
Okay, so we're going to listen to a little bit of the Landing. Okay, so we're going to listen to a little bit of the landing. Now, bear in mind, you know, they're this very, very lightly constructed, just enough to do the job. Spacecraft, lunar module, call the lunar balloon for a good reason it was so thinly hulled that when you pressurized it it expanded. Now Neil just said that's the Armstrong program alarm.

38:41
The computer had packed up which it did five or six times during the landing I think five and basically did a reboot sequence, which it was designed to do. But they didn't want that happening. So imagine hurtling towards the lunar surface, you're shooting way over range, so you know you're coming in long, you're going to go past your landing zone Soon fuel is going to be getting critical and then your computer reboots again. And without the computer you don't know your altitude or your speed or your range or a whole lot of anything, except what you can see out the window. He did have little etchings on the window that he could look past, kind of like a sextant scale, but that's real loose eyeballing because you move your head 10 degrees and suddenly you're in a different spot. Anyway, let's listen. That's Aldrin and you'll hear another program alarm. You can hear. The quality of the signal is awful and all we had was radio. There was no TV of this 7 minutes 30 seconds.

40:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is beautiful, roger. I'll do it 16 times. I'll do it. Descent to fuel crit.

40:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Descent to fuel Fuel crit means fuel critical.

40:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
He's running low on fuel now. Come on, neil, you can do it.

40:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and so Armstrong's actually flying the thing at this point he's taking over from the computer and Aldrin is not looking out the window. Aldrin is just watching the computer displays and reading off the displays to Armstrong so he can hear it while he's staring out the window. Okay, we got quite a while in this recording so maybe we should skip ahead. So you know, they keep getting these 1202 and 1201 errors on the computer which are a heart-clenching moment, and again you hear Armstrong going computer alarm. Then a minute later give us a reading on that alarm. And in Mission Control they're not freaking out, but there's some tension there because nobody immediately knew what the alarm was. What the hell's a 1201? Fortunately steve bales who was on a console down in the land oh, they're landing. Okay, I'll tell them that's 30 seconds until they have to abort and they're still off the ground.

41:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Contact, please Contact, contact. Okay, engine stop ACI at a decent Auto, descent Auto Control both autos, engine command override off, engine arm off 413 is in Engine, arm is off.

42:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We copy you down Eagle T1, stand by T1. Tranquility Base. Here the Eagle has landed Okay.

42:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's enough of that you got to get. The music swells up and everyone is like cheering Right.

42:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Actually there were a few cheers of mission control.

42:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There we go.

42:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And then Gene Kranz looks around and says all right, settle down in here. We got a mission to do so. He snapped at him right away, but he had to. But anyway, what I was going to say is these computer alarms came up 1201, 1202. And people look around like like, okay, what's a 1202 alarm?

42:46
And a guy named steve bales, on console, happened to remember that they had had a simulation a few weeks before and I think it only happened in one or two of the situations which they did hundreds of, of course that had one of these show up and nobody thought much of the time. But he thought, well, well, you know what, I'm going to make a list of all the computer alarms and put it in the back of my clipboard. So while they're hurtling towards the surface, he's back there flipping through 898, 899, 1201, 1202, and found it and said okay, that's not critical, keep going. And then it changed from 1202 to 1201. And he said that's how critical, keep going.

43:23
And the reason it wasn't critical is because margaret hamilton, the brilliant woman at mit who designed the computer and the software for it I remember this was the first computer to fly on, something that would actually navigate beyond earth. You know they had tried computers and planes, but nothing they even came close to this. Computers were the size of my house back then. I don't have a very big house, but they were huge and this thing had to be sized down to something about the size of a briefcase 32 bit. You know the the numbers go on. Basically it was enough to power your microwave maybe, but that said it was what would get them down the lunar surface and back off the lunar surface and to Iran to go in orbit, and without it it would have been very difficult to succeed, if it was possible at all, especially coming home.

44:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think it's funny how the Buzz and Neil were supposed to go to sleep after they landed right Take a break before the moonwalk?

44:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And they're like, nope, we're just gonna go we're just gonna go outside right now well, so okay, so let me just just trundle it around this bit for a bit. So they're coming down, they're very close to the surface, buzz is reading out you know what, he's watching on the computer and the radar, and neil's staring intently out the window and they're right at the point of touchdown and suddenly there's this huge crater in a boulder field and they're like what. But he realized a little before that that they were overshooting their landing zone because when the lunar module separated from the command module, there was a little residual air in the docking tunnel.

45:04
And it was just enough to make a little pop a little like a champagne cork and that threw them off downrange by like three or four miles. So a little bit more to talk about here. But let's go to a break. Before we do that, we will be right back. So stand by, don't land without us. All right.

45:22
So they're coming down, they're, they're landing long armstrong. Looks down, there's not a nice smooth, tranquil floor like you're supposed to see in maria trunk, tranquilitatis, tranquilitatis, but there's, uh, rocks and craters and holes and all kinds of stuff. And remember, lunar module can't come down with anything larger than about 18 inches under any one of its landing pads or any hole deeper than 18 inches, or it may not be able to tick off again. So this is getting a little critical and it's because, as I said, they had this extra pressure when they separated, as they're running long. So that's why fuel is getting so low.

46:03
This particular lunar module is one of the early ones, so it didn't carry as big a fuel load as later ones did, but boy was it borderline. So towards the end there, what we did know as a young man listening is what they're saying 60 seconds, 30 seconds now, that's not 30 seconds to oblivion, but that is 30 seconds to when he's supposed to abort and come home. And of course the question in many minds is would he have? Because he knew to to his credit, this wasn't just him being a jock fighter pilot or something test pilot he knew that if they are within probably 15, 16 feet of the surface and the engine cut out, that's just the descent engine. It's not taking any fuel from the ascent engine, which is separate, on a separate stage. He knew the thing would just settle down and thump to the surface, so they'd be okay. Yeah, but you still didn't want to do that, right.

46:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you could break a leg, you could tip over. You don't know, you don't know, right, you don't know right, that's true.

47:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So the one other thing I want to mention so, you're right, they get on the surface, they're supposed to take a nap and they call in and say, guys, really, we're ready to go.

47:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But it was still a number of hours for them. I just want to point out that whole Tanner Hooks thing In the documentary, the Apollo 11 documentary, where it's just the historical video and audio.

47:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Which one? Because there was the CNN one that most people saw, and then there was the good one that was done by 1895 Films.

47:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That I worked on.

47:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, oh good. Oh, I thought you were going to say the CNN.

47:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, because it talks about like it talks about Neil's heart rate going up on on the way, on the way down, and you don't. It's so real calm. He's got his beats at a hundred beats per minute you know it's like.

47:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, it's like 165, 100 beats is is my resting pulse rate just sitting here, yeah no, it was.

47:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It was very high and it's of course he's just talking nice and calm, but it's like no, no, he's sweating bullets.

48:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Give me some info on that computer alarm and it's like guys, yeah.

48:08
Well, and and buzz too. I mean he was absolutely cool as ice staying on that computer, not looking out the window towards what could very easily have become his doom. So they land, they, they kind of chill for a while, but they don't sleep and then they suit up and go out. They explore for two and a half hours. There's two more things I want to mention here. So armstrong opens a hatch. Then they had trouble with that. There was some again residual air and lunar module. They couldn't get to depressurize completely. It's a couple of percent. But they're tugging and tugging on this hatch. It's not going to open. And you know, you know there's some engineer at grumman thinking, oh god, what did we do? You know they got all the way to the moon. They can't get out, uh. So buzz finally reached down because he was in a position to have some leverage, and bent the hatchback it was so thin you could actually torque it and it went and there was this little puff of icy air that went out and they were finally able to leave. So they're going down the ladder Now.

49:07
The lunar module is in a vacuum, so you can't hear anything. You don't hear this little sound. When Neil's going down the ladder. Neil gets out of the bottom of the ladder and he says his famous words One step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Although One step for a man, one giant leap for mankind, although all we hear on the recording is one step for man.

49:25
Don't know what happened to that A. And he's standing on the footpad. He starts describing lunar surface and within a minute or two mission control says okay, neil, time to get on that contingency sample. Now the contingency sample is where you've got a little like the thing you see people picking up trash in the park. It's a little handle with a grabber on the end and Neil was supposed to very rapidly grab some dirt and pebbles off the surface and stick them in his pocket. And the reason it's called the contingency sample is because if you have to take off in a hurry because of emergency, you want to have something with the billions of dollars you spent getting there, you've got a little piece of the moon.

50:00
Well, he's talking, and he's talking. And they're saying Neil, contingency sample, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, over to the right there's these really cool craters and wow, look at the colors there and the texture. And, boy, the soil is very powdery. Yeah, and they're really starting to get a little heated under the colors. So he finally does it.

50:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's, he finally does it. That's kind of cute, okay. So there's a lot to say about the moonwalk, but we'll do that another time. Well, I'll just point out that in the in the film in the shadow of the moon, which interviewed most but not all of the, the apollo moonwalkers and the apollo astronauts, um buzz alternate just said that did say that, as he was on the ladder going down, that he did uh take a take a leak in his space suit to become the first person to pee on the moon. Thank you for that, dr.

50:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Mellon. I would like to let everyone know that it's a very good documentary.

50:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You should watch it so that you can get that tidbit Straight from the astronaut's mouth.

50:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What was not a documentary was First man, which shows a depressed, practically schizophrenic Neil Armstrong stumbling around the moon, feeling all dejected about the loss of his daughter, and I'm sure that was a big deal. But you don't get it by listening to the downlink from that moonwalk. He was happy, he was engaged, he was curious, he was having a fantastic time. They both were. But in that movie Ryanosling's wandering around. I guess I'll throw the bracelet over here, which he never did, by the way. I just it just bugs me because it was a very poor representation of it.

51:32
Anyway, they do the spacewalk. Things go great. They get a half hour extension coming back in the lunar module, so buzz came down second and buzz is first back up the ladder and they get inside the, the limb and they hook up to the air supply in there so they can throw their backpacks and cameras and other heavy stuff out the door. Because the LEM is running by a very slim margin and if you ate an extra taco that morning before you got in it, you're not going to be able to get back into orbit. So they're getting rid of everything they can. They close the hatch and remember that I said there's that little snap when neil was climbing out of the uh of the limb. Yeah, there's a little snapping noise. Well, turns out, of the 200 or so switches and circuit breakers in the lunar module, the one that his backpack bumped and snapped off was the ascent engine arming breaker that's right, which is the go home button right.

52:24
So they phone into mission control and say, hey, guess what? We uh snapped off that switch. So there's, you know. I don't think there's a brief panic or anything, but there's certainly stress. So they were now going to have their sleep and rest period before they came home and the engineers at grumman are getting together with the guys at the Cape at Mission Control Johnson Space Center and saying, okay, let's figure this out. They work out this elaborate rerouting of switch positions and breakers and so forth to make sure they can actually get back. But when the time comes, my man, buzz Aldrin, looks at it and says wait a minute, don't telegraph the ending, okay okay, geez, you gotta give me something, you gotta give looks at it, pulls a felt, a fisher felt, tip pen out of his pocket, uncaps it.

53:16
The point is just the right size to fit into the hole where this thing snapped off and he goes, click and resets the breaker. Nasa saves the day for 29 cents Fisher space pens. That's the cheapest fix in American space history and probably only beat by the Russians, who probably fix something with a pencil because they like pencils instead of pens.

53:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Also immortalized in the animated film Fly Me to the Moon about a group of three little flies that fly to the moon.

53:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Thank you for that. Do you want to add anything else about Apollo 11? Because we probably ought to break again.

53:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, I think it was amazing. I think it was amazing and it's something that we should celebrate that we were the first the the, the first, the the that we were able to send. We as like humanity, not we as like rah rah.

54:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
America, right, that's no excuse me who did it well I believe it was the united states it was, but I don't recall as like the soviet union or china or anybody else, giving us a whole lot of help on this. So just saying you know, I'm not not a nationalistic core.

54:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, maybe, but you know we should talk about what's coming next after.

54:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Take a little credit for that we will, you'll get your piece, but let's take a moment. You know, I think, what kind of what you're going to is. We really ought to have a moon day. July 20th should be a national holiday. It says, hey, we did it. It was half a million people, almost 20 plus billion dollars of effort, a martyred president, you know, people working around the clock, divorces and alcoholism and all this stuff that happens when you got people on a mission. But they did it. It was remarkable, and whoever gets back there first in the next handful of years are going to be the second ones. Just saying. Just saying so, I'm sorry I didn't. Oh, look at the balloons what was that?

55:15
wow, I keep having. Every time I get a system update on my mac it, it switches back on the gestures control. So I'm sorry, did you have more you want to say? But that's a good point about you know celebrating oh no, I'm just.

55:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We can talk about what's, what's coming up in the future, how it influenced all that stuff, what, uh in in a bit too so well and we're going to as soon as we come back from this break.

55:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, standby for countdown. So we got our astronauts back from the moon. They went on a world tour for about a month, drove them bats, that's after three weeks of quarantine, because we didn't want to hurt the world of moon germs. And oh, by the way, they were concerned enough about moon germs to put them in quarantine. I think it was largely a PR move, let's not forget. After the capsule splashes down down, three skin divers swim over there, open the door, throw in some biocontainment stuff right say, okay, dress up.

56:11
It's like that's the moment that the tentacles get out and take over the planet and make us all green and warty but anyway um so uh, five more lunar landings and uh, the apollo program wraps up at 72, and we haven't been back since, nor have we left Earth orbit since.

56:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, with people, with people, yeah, with people. Artemis, I went to the moon.

56:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Got real close. Calm down, calm down.

56:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'll let you have your say.

56:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, you know, from my perspective, having lived this and then lived this long interval waiting, and having been through the plans for the, you know, george HW Bush had a proposal for his space program, lunar landing program. Reagan, of course, had the earlier iteration of space station, space station freedom. And then George W Bush has the constellation program. Boo, he's getting these promises about. Ok, we're going back, you get to relive, and nothing. So finally now Artemis rises from the ashes of the asteroid redirect mission yes, both of which are using hardware left over from some of the designs for the Constellation program, some of the designs for the Constellation program. So it's a very weird hybrid of bits and pieces and stuff you find littering the sides of the freeway together and get us back to the moon. So we've had the flight of Artemis. I Tarek, yes, what's next and what's in our future, because you know everything.

57:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, well, I wish that were the case and I hope I hope against hope that by the time we circle back for the 56th anniversary, that we'll be like a month away, two months away from the actual next launch to the moon with astronauts. But you know, the sad reality is we've had a lot of delays, delays, and when we thought we'd have astronauts back to the moon, which we thought we would this year, then we've had yet more delays, to next year at the earliest. And the same thing is true with when they're going to land on the moon, which we can talk about a little bit because, oh my gosh, but at least right now, 55 years after Apollo 11, I can say that we can be assured that Artemis 1, that first uncrewed trip to the moon, wasn't a big write-off. Nasa actually, this week, rolled out the next rocket.

58:40
You know the core stage, the space launch system Artemis 2 booster, and they rolled it out of the factory and it's on it's shipping out to the space center so they can start building the next rocket for Artemis 2. So that's progressing, but it's just it feels like it's going like molasses and this is looking back at that at that time, um, you know, like with, with, with apollo 11, which launched what? July, 16th of 1969, and then in what, october, november, is that when apollo 12 launches, you know, in like yeah, I mean literally and it's like months later was launching every two months.

59:24
So the the plan already yeah, and the plan right now is that these artemis missions are going to launch maybe once a year, maybe once, maybe, if we're lucky.

59:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And, by the way, let's not forget that artemis 2 is not going into lunar orbit, it's a flyby because, for whatever reason, nasa made a decision a decade ago the SLS upper stage and the service module are so underpowered that you can't go into and leave lunar orbit, yeah, and only fly by, which is embarrassing.

59:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, you need to have a more powerful upper stage. They call it the exploration upper stage that they're building. Boeing is supposedly building it. We know Boeing has their own problems with the stuff, but you know say what you will the SLS worked pretty well when they launched.

01:00:15
So I think that they'll be able to iron that part out, but it's just very frustrating.

01:00:19
I think that they'll be able to iron that part out, but it's just very frustrating.

01:00:20
I think I am frustrated more than anything else I'm sure you are too with all of the waiting that we've had to do for these missions. At Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans this week, watching Artemis II come out and said very frankly how impressed he was to see not just the booster, the core booster rollout, but the hardware, the rings, the tanks for Artemis III, iv, v, all the way up through IX. They've got components there, and the same is true I think they've got components of up through V right now for the orions, uh, that they're that they're putting together. That is a much better place, uh, than we were five years ago, you know, during the 50th anniversary, um, because they had like nothing. They had none of this stuff, maybe parts of sls for for artemis one, and that was about, was about it, and so it does seem like the ball is rolling enough that it is an inevitability when they're going to get to the surface. I'm not going to say that it's going to happen on time, but it seems like we have.

01:01:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, you've kind of missed that already. Yeah well.

01:01:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
the Artemis program is a very rare human spaceflight program that has survived presidential administrations. It was founded I think it was the first time.

01:01:48
Yeah, it was founded during the Trump administration. They named it Artemis. They said this is what we're going to do and then, during this current Biden administration it's still going fine they launched Artemis 1. During this current Biden administration it's still going fine. They launched Artemis 1, and it seems like it's far enough that, no matter what happens with this current cycle that we're in, it's going to continue going forward, so I'm hopeful. In the meantime, northrop Grumman is testing a new version of the boosters. They're not ready yet. They probably won't be until Artemis 3.4, or, pardon me, artemis 4 or 5.

01:02:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
The boosters being the solid.

01:02:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
The solid boosters. They're going to be lighter and because they're lighter they'll be able to have more capacity for lift on the way forward. It's a composite design that is a bit more robust than the current ones, which is just an extra segment of a five-segment solid rocket booster, just a little bit larger than the space shuttle ones themselves. So that's really encouraging and I can't wait to see how that is. And one point thing that you pointed out earlier when you were a boy, little Roddy Pyle, sitting in front of the TV. I was small once, yeah, that you had a boy, little.

01:02:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Rod, little Roddy Pyle sitting on the TV. Believe it or not, I was small once yeah.

01:03:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That you had three networks and that was it to watch the landing.

01:03:06
We were talking about this today on the Spacecom team about what that's going to be like in 2026, in September 26, when Artemis 3 supposedly lands on the moon and the astronauts get out and take that long, long, long starship elevator ride that I'm sure we're going to talk about in a little bit to the surface, how that's going to be watched around the world, because we don't just have one network or three networks now, we have like a bajillion, and then everyone can watch it live on YouTube or Twitch or X or x or facebook or whatever you know. Um, how much more uh it will. Will it be watched then and broadcast and commented on? I'm sure you and I will be there, uh, uh, doing it all in in real time. It's going to be interesting to see how many people see this, see it this time as opposed to last, um and what, what effect that's going to have around the world will you and I be there well, hopefully, unless we hit by a bus, I mean we'll be alive.

01:04:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But will we both be alive on the same channel, which would mean being on spacecom? Let's see, I don't believe I've ever been live on spacecom well, perhaps my face has never appeared on space.

01:04:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Anyway, I'll have to figure that out. We'll have to figure that out because that's going to be a mission and a half to yeah, we got.

01:04:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Apparently we have some time. All right, speaking of time, we'll be right back and we'll have our last second standby. So, uh, you're right, we do want to talk about the human landing system, because that's an important topic. But one thing I wanted to talk about before that, if I may, is this upcoming election. So we can expect, I think, if biden slash, you know, fill in the blank is elected, uh, for a democratic administration, we'll probably have more of the same generally, you know. So there will still be some struggling for funding, there will still be some delays, but things will continue pretty much as they are. The big question mark is what happens if we have another trump administration. Now, trump administration was where this you renewed moon interest really got kicked into high gear anyway. So that gives us a little bit of an indication.

01:05:25
There was an editorial published in Forbes recently by our friend of the show, greg Autry and Alexander William Salter, and I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but some of the quotes are competition with China will be the key issue Quote America is increasingly vulnerable to threats from abroad, many of them celestial in nature. Unquote Quote. To win, we must counter the space ambitions of aggressor states while leading the free world forward to prosperity in the final frontier. Unquote. So what does that mean? I mean, you know that's, that's rhetoric, yeah, but the idea is that that china is is now filling the boots.

01:06:08
The soviet union, I mean that's what's what god has kicked enough to high gear, at least attempted high gear where we were gonna try and get the first lunar landing in 2024 during the Trump administration didn't happen. It may not even happen during a second Trump administration, if there is one, but we hope it happens at least before 2030. And then, of course, as I've opined before, I think the Chinese, unless they're absolutely, absolutely sure it's not going to work, will take pretty much any risk that's needed to land before the end of 2029, because that's the uh anniversary of the communist party's seizure of china back in 1949. So that's my bit on that. Let's hear yours well, the, the.

01:06:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think you're right.

01:06:53
I think I think that, um, if, if, if, biden, then it will just continue.

01:07:00
I mean, it will be very interesting to see if there are changes in the funding levels for NASA, because of what we're seeing already with the cancellation of Viper, et cetera we were talking about earlier, if they're going to get a little bit more buffer, you know, a little bit more padding, so they don't have to do that, and then. But if you are, you are, I think, spot on. If, if, if, if, the, if Trump has another administration, there is a special place. I think that they see space playing and we've already seen Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, really pushing hard on the China competition when he is speaking before House subcommittees and House committees and Senate committees on funding for NASA. They need to do this because China is already going to, and I think that argument is going to be really strong if Trump has another four years to try to really push it, because I think that any president would like to be the one sitting in the White House when astronauts return to the moon, because you get to claim that it was on your watch.

01:08:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, I mean, look at what Nixon did after Johnson and Kennedy finished their space program. Nixon's in office for eight minutes. You know, Neil, we're all so proud of you for being on the moon. Yeah, exactly, Even as a kid I thought you were a bonehead.

01:08:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There's that iconic photo of him talking to them through the. What is it? The Astrovan. You know where they were being— In detention, yeah, yeah, quarantine, the quarantine van. And detention when he was a chair of the National Space Council, which he did very well.

01:08:59
Yeah, he was the person who stand up there and basically said to Boeing if you can't do this, then we will find someone else who can, by any means necessary. He said that when there were lots of delays for SLS and all of a sudden you saw a lot of things getting frontline, getting pushed, but it does cost money. And so how the budget's going to shake out? Will science be more affected because they have to transfer it over to human spaceflight? Are they really going to stick with SpaceX as the only provider for Artemis III or are they going to move over to someone like, because you know, blue Origin?

01:09:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
is competing.

01:09:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah for the lander, for the crew lander, because Starship seems to be going a lot slower than NASA and maybe SpaceX had sold it in the beginning. I mean, it's been let's see how many years since they were selected At least two, you know, or one.

01:09:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think no more, because we had a whole year of lawsuits with Blue Origin, so I think it's closer to four.

01:10:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and so they haven't actually done a full orbit yet, let alone done the in-flight refueling test that they have to do, let alone finish the pad at Florida that they want to finish A lot of things.

01:10:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And you've got to have a couple of robotic landing tests on the moon to make sure the damn thing doesn't tip over. Yeah, they have to do that. They haven't even shown a demo of those legs yet. I mean, you know we're coming up on oh yeah, so talk about 1950s science movies. You know it's like okay, we'll open the hatch and throw a knotted rope out and we'll climb down to the surface. Rope out and we'll climb down to the surface.

01:10:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean they've got to design some kind of elevator that runs. Is it 120 feet off the ground?

01:10:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
something like that, yeah, plus the legs. So yeah, it's, it's, it's immense, it's crazy. And landing that thing, I mean it'll probably be done by computer, but you're basically going to have to be looking at, facing up with your back to the moon, looking tv screens. So there's a lot, to lot to know here.

01:11:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Spacex has a lot of experience with vertical landings now that's true with their, with their, with their rockets, you know, and I and I, I think that by the time and unlike a barge, the moon isn't moving yeah, yeah, well, the terrain, though, right, the terrain, yeah, is going to be a question mark.

01:11:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So well, but you know jpl, on the hand, has a ton of experience with what's it called range trigger. Anyway, doing live trajectory updates, as you're coming down.

01:11:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They do dare mighty things.

01:11:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They do, and we could talk about this all day, but we can't. I'll just say there's this great quote that, despite 20 books, and many of them being about apollo, I've never been able to definitively get the source of gene. Cernan claimed it, others claimed it, but in in essence it is it's as if john f kennedy reached the 21st century and pulled apollo back into the 1960s, yeah, which I thought was a brilliant thing, because it really was like that.

01:11:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
All right, and let's just say I'm going to call it right now, but in five years, five years from this week, in 2029, astronauts, nasa astronauts, will be walking on the moon. I'm going to say that, I'm going to say it definitively, and you can have this chair, rod, if it doesn't happen. You can have this chair if we don't have Artemis astronauts on the moon by July 20th 2029.

01:12:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, so what do you get if the bet goes the other way? I don't know. I'll think about it. What do I have that you want besides dangerously good looks?

01:12:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Take me for a boat ride on the yacht.

01:12:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Let let's go, and you know, by then I'll probably have it ready to go. Okay, that's a good idea, all right, well, thank you everybody for joining us for episode 120 of this week in space, the. Let's torture anthony by seeing how long we can go before we wrap the show edition. Oh, I'm sorry. The apollo 11 of beyond edition. Um and uh. Just want to remind everybody that the National Space Society site at nssorg and spacecom websites the name are both good places not just to satisfy your spaceflight cravings although that's part of it but also to keep up with the latest of what's going on, because we all love the same thing. Please don't forget to check out Ad Astra Magazine at adastramagazinecom T, at astromagazine, at astromagazinecom Tarek. Where can we keep up with your amazing life achievements?

01:13:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you can find me all the time at spacecom, where I really encourage everyone to check out our 25 years of spacecom features that we've been running all this week, where we've been looking at the last 25 years of space exploration and the next 25 years of space exploration and we-.

01:13:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
When you'll still be there.

01:13:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and you can find me on our YouTube channel at Video From Space, where we had a really great panel. We missed you, Rod. I'm sorry. Maybe next time.

01:13:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Let me explain why you missed me, but that's okay.

01:13:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Talking with Sarah Seeger, Tom Marshburn and John Mulchey about where they see the humanity going in the next 25 years, and you can find me on the Twitter at rx, at Tarek J Malik, and on YouTube at SpaceTronPlays too, where I got to finish my Star Wars Lego Fortnite Battle Pass. That'll be my big thing this weekend.

01:14:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, wars, lego, fortnite, battle pass. So that'll be my big thing for this weekend. All right, and uh, please don't forget, you can find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom. As I already said, remember to drop us a line at twist at twittv. That's t-w-i-s at twittv. We welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas. Really, really, we do. I mean, we answer every single single email because, because we don't, we don't have personal lives.

01:14:41
New episodes published every Friday are available on your favorite podcatcher and this is important. Everybody listen. I know this is like the stuff at the end of the show, but please subscribe, give us reviews, tell your friends, whatever it takes. We really need it and we work hard on the show. We love this show. We love you. I even like tarik. So it's, it's important. So get on there, click those buttons and let the world know how much you adore us. And, of course, join club twit seven dollars a month, more if you can give it, less if you just want one show, but there's so much stuff available there that you're not going to get on just the public streams. I mean, they work, they're great. You got to listen to commercials, but, uh, you join club twit, you get all kinds of cool stuff and that warm inner glow of knowing you did the right thing to help the network and leo and the gang Studio is closing soon.

01:15:39
None of us are thrilled seeing that, but it's what's got to be done to keep things going. And you know, if they can get their Club Twit membership up another few percent, they can keep doing what you valued for so long. So step up and be counted I know I have. You can follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and twittv on Instagram. Thank you very much and we'll see you next week for a shorter episode.